​There is a nostalgia super mall inundating American pop culture. Netflix took over VH1’s “I Love the 80s” with Stranger Things and even brought back an updated Full House. The sitcom Everything Sucks! is their take on the 90s. South Park dedicated an entire season to things called ‘Member Berries’ whose one-liners invaded our vernacular - “Member the Millennium Falcon? I Member!” Lionel Richie is an American Idol judge and Hollywood already remade RoboCop, Footloose, and About Last Night. Steven Spielberg is responsible for a major portion of our collective nostalgia from Jaws, to Indiana Jones, to Jurassic Park. He also pushes us forward with cinematic technological advances during his blockbuster creations. Ready Player One features the next generation’s jump forward in Virtual Reality, but he infuses the new world with old school icons - and to control the future in the virtual world of OASIS, you must know the past.

A major theme in Ready Player One is taking a leap of faith. For the plot, it means moving past your fears of social interaction and taking a chance on a girl. For the filmmaking, it means stepping-up the motion capture game by incorporating cutting-edge VR techniques. Spielberg is no stranger to motion capture as most of The Adventures of Tintin and The BFG feature the green screen, but for Ready Player One, the actors can see their avatar counterparts, even if they are 10-foot tall behemoths. Spielberg built the digital sets into VR glasses, which the characters in the film are already wearing to enter the OASIS world anyways. Now, instead of imagining the fantastic settings while hopping around in front of a green screen, they can see the out of this world locations and interact fluidly with what their co-stars really look like. Spielberg used the headset as well planning the online environment’s shots.

Even though Ready Player One represents a video game world, the audience is not required to have played video games. Generation X’s version of a mad genius, James Halliday (Mark Rylance, Dunkirk), created a digital world called OASIS, which took over humanity’s attention. Most folks only take their goggles off to eat and sleep which may be why Columbus, Ohio, the fastest growing city on Earth in the year 2045, looks run-down and on the verge of apathetic anarchy. In OASIS, you can be whomever you want to be – a badass hero, a malevolent villain, or most likely, a character from pop culture from the past 30 years. There is so much to see in Ready Player One, I believe I only caught a sliver of the references including Beetlejuice, Ninja Turtles, a bunch of Nintendo characters, and the DeLorean.

Getting the rights to use all of these characters must have been a nightmare. Ready Player One is a Warner Bros. property, but it is full of intellectual property from Disney, Universal, Paramount, and Fox to name just a few. In a particularly wise move, Spielberg didn’t use uber-iconic characters to ping your nostalgia nerve-endings; you won’t see Darth Vader, Jaws, or any of the Avengers flying around. Besides, playing the game of spotting and identifying the hundreds of smaller characters is a game in and of itself. Anyways, Halliday was dying and feared what his OASIS could become if it fell into the wrong hands.

The wrong hands is an evil multi-national corporation who wants to take over OASIS and stuff it full of advertisements and rule it from the top down, rather than leave it as the level playing field Halliday envisioned. To separate the worthy from the malign, Halliday chose to turn the rights to OASIS over to the winner of an Easter Egg challenge, a series of complex puzzles designed to find an altruistic and brilliant innovator who will care for and protect the virtual world. The puzzles include an intense road race, a visit to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and even a digression back to the Atari 2600. Our hero questing to solve Halliday’s enigmas is Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan, The Tree of Life) who goes by Parzival in OASIS. He is one of the few loners who has not joined a clan to pool his powers but has unique friends such as Aech (Lena Waithe), a giant adept at building and modifications, the mysterious Art3mis (Olivia Cooke, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl), who has her own secrets, and a couple other minor online friends.

We side with the disparate avatars as they bond with one another searching for clues and keys. The evil corporation’s CEO, Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story), doesn’t care about online freedom and net neutrality; he is a robber baron who would as soon destroy OASIS than let a bunch of kids have free reign. Permeating our experience is Alan Silvestri’s old school score which tells a musical narrative; it does something we don’t hear too often anymore; there is a bad guy theme and a good guy theme. This is traditional Hollywood filmmaking and another key car on the nostalgia express. Keep your eyes perked up for the Back to the Future soundtrack; I got a shiver up my spine from that one.

While the screenplay by Zak Penn and Ernest Cline is based on Cline’s 2011 sci-fi novel, Spielberg uses it as a message and maybe even a warning for 2018. Our devices make us forget where we are. We get lost in escapism on our phones just as our parents got lost in television and radio. There is always something to distract us from homework and our real world responsibilities. These escape portals are only going to become more revolutionary and involving and Ready Player One takes some space to remind us to spend some time in the here and now in reality. It may be a tad hypocritical considering the whiz-bang insanity Spielberg throws at us for a commanding 140 minutes, but it’s a message more than relevant to where we are as a society.